Tuesday, June 30, 2015

CAIRO —
They have been taken from their homes, the streets, even from schools.
Some have turned up dead, while others have just vanished.

They
are Egypt’s disappeared: dozens of students and activists kidnapped in
what human rights advocates say is an escalation of the government’s campaign against dissent.

Egyptian
activists say they have documented a disturbing rise in forced
disappearances over the past two months, cases in which victims are
taken without warrants and police deny knowledge of their whereabouts.
The detainees often show up later in court or are released without
explanation. At least two who were recently seized by security forces
were later found dead, according to rights groups.

“People have
disappeared in Egypt before but definitely not at this rate,” said
Khaled Abdel Hamid, spokesman for the rights group Freedom for the
Brave.

The group says that security forces have kidnapped 163 people since April and that 64 of them have since been released.

Another
rights organization, “3adala” (Justice), said it had confirmed
91 disappearance cases in April and May and that 38 people are still
missing. The discrepancy in the tallies is attributable to different
verification methods and contact networks, as well as the opaque nature
of Egypt’s security apparatus, activists say.

Last
month, the Cairo-based Alkarama rights group announced that it had
asked the U.N. Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances
to intervene in connection with seven cases of forced abductions in
Egypt.

The U.N. group has said in statements that it has sought since
2011 to visit the country but that Egyptian authorities have not
responded to its requests.

The Interior Ministry did not respond to repeated requests for comment about the allegations of mass detentions.

“We
normally find out [about the abductions] through witnesses” who report
seeing people dragged away by police or plainclothes agents on the
streets or from their homes, Abdel Hamid said.

In one instance, he said, a woman watched as Ahmed al-Ghazali, a member of the left-leaning April 6 Youth Movement,
was detained by men she presumed were plainclothes police officers.

During a melee in which Ghazali was shoved into an unmarked van,
according to the woman, his phone fell out of his pocket. The woman
picked it up and used it to contact his friends and family, the activist
said.

Other times, sympathetic police officers leak information
to relatives or lawyers searching for the missing. Sometimes, fellow
prisoners with access to a lawyer spot the missing detainees and help
get word out to the community of activists.

Authorities
don’t normally alert relatives when a missing detainee is about to
appear before a judge.

According to Abdel Hamid, rights groups, with
their webs of contacts, often receive anonymous phone calls notifying
them that a disappeared person is about to turn up in court.

In
recent weeks, the detainees who have seen a judge have been charged with
engaging in unlawful political activities or demonstrations. The
suspects are often appointed a public defender.

The now-banned
April 6 Youth Movement had called for a general strike on June 11 to
protest Egypt’s deteriorating economic conditions. Many of its leaders
have been targeted for arrest, rights groups say.

“It’s a scare tactic to keep people in line,” Abdel Hamid said of the disappearances.

The state’s increased offensive against its political opponents started in the summer of 2013, when the military ousted the elected president, Mohamed Morsi — a response to massive street protests against the Islamist leader’s rule.

But Morsi’s overthrow polarized the country. His supporters demonstrated in the streets, and security officers responded forcefully,
gunning down unarmed protesters on several occasions. President Abdel
Fatah al-Sissi, who was defense minister at the time, gained widespread
support for his bid to crush the Muslim Brotherhood, from which Morsi
hailed.

But the crackdown soon widened
to include secular and leftist activists as well as rights advocates
and employees of nonprofit groups. In the months after Sissi’s takeover,
from July 2013 to May 2014, the government detained, charged or
sentenced more than 41,000 people, according to Human Rights Watch.

Egypt
is experiencing “repression the likes of which it hasn’t seen in
decades,” Joe Stork, the deputy Middle East and North Africa director
for Human Rights Watch, said in a statement this past week.

The New
York-based group said Sissi “has provided near total impunity for
security force abuses . . . and severely curtailed civil and political rights.”

When
freelance photographer Esraa al-Taweel disappeared June 1, her father
feared the worst. She had left her house in a Cairo suburb to have
dinner with two friends, he said. But neither she nor her companions
returned home.

Her family launched a frantic search for Esraa,
23, who was crippled last year when security forces shot her as she was
photographing a demonstration. They ended up at a local police station.
“They told us she was not there,” said her father, Mahfouz al-Taweel.

But
several low-ranking police officers later whispered to him that she had
indeed been detained, he recounted. Some activists say they suspect
that police may have arrested her because she had a camera, which she
often carried with her.

“They said the officers would never tell us,” Taweel said of the police recruits.

“She is handicapped and needs treatment,” he added. “I just want to know where my daughter is.”

On
Thursday, Freedom for the Brave received information that one of
Esraa’s companions, a student named Omar Ali, had been seen at the
maximum-security Aqrab prison outside Cairo by a fellow detainee. Word
was spread through trusted sources and surreptitious phone calls, the
activists said. The group has been unable to determine what Ali might be
charged with.

“In my entire career as a lawyer,
I had never encountered [forced disappearances] until now,” said Amro
Hassan of the Cairo-based Association for Free Thought and Expression, a
nongovernmental group that advocates freedom of expression in Egypt.
“I’m still trying to understand it.”

Mohamed Zarea is the head of
the Human Rights Association for the Assistance of Prisoners and has
defended and assisted detainees for nearly two decades. He said he dealt
with 40 cases of forced disappearances in the mid-1990s, when Egypt was
grappling with a violent Islamist insurgency.

“Most of the
people who disappeared were radical Islamists,” he said, adding that the
victims vanished for years at a time — or in some cases were never
found. “What happens now is someone is kidnapped and then sent to court
later on trumped-up charges.”

The periods during which the current detainees disappear are much shorter, he said.

In
online spreadsheets and on Facebook, activists have circulated lists of
those who have reportedly gone missing over the past two months. They
include young and old, teachers and students, fathers and sons.

“Taken into a microbus and detained,” one entry reads.

Another,
compiled by the prominent activist Mona Seif, catalogues the arrest of
the family of April 6 Youth Movement member Nour al-Sayyed Mahfouz.

“All
three blindfolded & detained from their home,” it reads, referring
to Mahfouz, her father and her brother. In a news story linked to the
entry, Mahfouz’s mother says the police took the three.

There is a June 1 note on the Sinai-based rights activist Sabry al-Ghoul: “Reportedly died after being detained by the military."

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi of Egypt
has presided over the flagrant abuse of human rights since taking
office a year ago pledging to restore stability. Violence by armed
groups and the government has escalated.

The United States and
European governments should stop overlooking Egyptian government abuses,
including a lack of accountability for many killings of protesters by
security forces, mass detentions, military trials of civilians, hundreds
of death sentences, and the forced eviction of thousands of families in
the Sinai Peninsula.

Over the past year, al-Sisi and his cabinet, governing by decree in
the absence of an elected parliament, have provided near total impunity
for security force abuses and issued a raft of laws that severely
curtailed civil and political rights, effectively erasing the human
rights gains of the 2011 uprising that ousted the longtime ruler Hosni
Mubarak.

“The al-Sisi government is acting as though to restore stability
Egypt needs a dose of repression the likes of which it hasn’t seen for
decades, but its treatment is killing the patient,” said Joe Stork,
deputy Middle East and North Africa director. “What makes it worse is
that Western governments that subordinated human rights in their
relations with Egypt during the Mubarak era seem ready to repeat their
mistake.”

No member of the security forces has been held accountable for the
mass killings of protesters that followed the military’s July 2013
removal of Mohamed Morsy, Egypt’s first freely elected president, which
al-Sisi orchestrated as defense minister. These included the killing of at least 900 people in a single day, August 14, during security operations to clear protest sites in Cairo.

These killings amounted to probable crimes against humanity. But a
government-commissioned fact-finding committee that investigated the
events related to Morsy’s removal released only an executive summary of
its findings in November 2014. The executive summary did not recommend
any investigations into the mass killings, and Egypt’s prosecutor
general has never announced an independent investigation.

Attacks by insurgent groups increased in the North Sinai governorate
immediately following Morsy’s removal, but both insurgent attacks and
government arrests and violence have escalated sharply since an October
2014 attack on a military base there, Human Rights Watch research has
found. Attacks on police and government infrastructure have also become
common in mainland Egypt. The government has responded by clearing a
kilometer-wide buffer zone on the border with the Gaza Strip, trying
thousands of civilians in military courts, and arresting those who
dissent.

In its annual report,
released in May 2015, the quasi-governmental National Council for Human
Rights (NCHR) stated that the “right to life witnessed horrible
deterioration” in 2013 and 2014. The report said that violence had
resulted in about 2,600 deaths in that period, including 700 security
personnel, 1,250 supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood – the organization
to which Morsy belonged – and 550 other civilians.

Since al-Sisi came to power, the authorities have continued to
aggressively enforce a de facto protest ban and routinely dispersed
anti-government demonstrations with force. In January 2015, at least 20 people died
during events surrounding the fourth anniversary of the 2011 uprising.

Prosecutors charged a member of the Central Security Forces (CSF) for
the January 24 killing of a leftist activist but also charged 17 people
who witnessed her killing with violating the anti-protest law. In
February, at least 19 soccer fans died in a stampede outside a Cairo
stadium after police fired tear gas into a crowd of hundreds lined up to
pass through an enclosed metal corridor. Prosecutors charged members of
one of the team’s fan clubs and alleged Brotherhood members for the
stampede, but no police officers.

A congressionally mandated US State Department report
on Egypt’s political situation submitted in May 2015 found that “a
series of executive initiatives, new laws, and judicial actions severely
restrict freedom of expression and the press, freedom of association,
freedom of peaceful assembly, and due process, and they undermine
prospects for democratic governance.”

Yet in March, President Barack
Obama resumed supplying military equipment to Egypt and announced that
most military aid would continue, albeit with policy changes, to be
implemented later, that would eliminate Egypt’s ability to buy on credit
and more strictly define the uses of such aid.

The European Union
(EU) and its 28 member states have failed to find a collective, firm,
and principled response to Egypt’s crackdown on dissent and the
imprisonment of critical journalists, activists, and political
opposition following blatantly unfair trials.

While EU High
Representative Federica Mogherini has expressed dismay about hundreds of
death penalties and noted that a May 16 verdict preliminarily
sentencing Morsy to death was “not in line with Egypt’s obligations
under international law,” she failed to insist on the release of those
who are wrongfully imprisoned.

The EU has repeatedly pledged to place human rights at the core of
its relations with third countries and stand up for those who defend
human rights and rule of law. However, when Mogherini attended a March
economic conference in the Egyptian city of Sharm al-Sheikh, she said
her visit was a signal of the EU’s “continuous support” to Egypt and she
remained silent on gross government abuses, the closing space for civil
society, and continued impunity for grave government abuses.

The US and EU should press al-Sisi and his advisers to roll back the
numerous repressive laws passed in the past two years and release the
many people unjustly detained for exercising their human rights, Human
Rights Watch said.

“Continued silence from the United States and Europe legitimizes
al-Sisi’s flawed logic that the state’s clampdown on its own citizens
will yield stability,” Stork said. “It’s not too late to push the
Egyptian government to correct its course.”

MASS ARRESTS & ABUSES IN DETENTION

The authorities detained, charged, or sentenced at least 41,000 people
between July 2013 and May 2014, straining Egypt’s prisons and
aggravating hugely overcrowded conditions in the police stations and
security directorates where the Interior Ministry now holds detainees,
many of them without trial.

In its report, the NCHR stated that prisons
were at 160 percent capacity, and police stations at 300 percent. The
authorities have also used unofficial facilities, including military
bases and security agency sites to house detainees. Torture and
ill-treatment at these facilities are routine.

Judges have routinely approved lengthy periods of pretrial detention
for accused Brotherhood members and activists who oppose the
government, while allowing members of the security forces and others who
support al-Sisi to be freed on bail. In one case, 494 people arrested
at Cairo’s Al Fath Mosque in August 2013 during the fallout from Morsy’s
removal and who are being tried together have been held in detention since their arrest.

In July 2014, the Interior Ministry said that
7,389 people arrested in connection with the unrest surrounding Morsy’s
overthrow remained in pretrial detention. It has not released updated
statistics. On June 6, 2015, the Interior Ministry announced that 200 detained high school students would take their final exams in prison.

Egyptian human rights organizations documented at least 124 deaths in
custody since August 2013 as a result of medical negligence, torture,
or ill-treatment. The Justice Ministry’s Forensic Medical Authority said
in December 2014 that at least 90 people
died that year in police stations in the Cairo and Giza governorates
alone.

At least three former Brotherhood parliament members have died in
custody. In May 2015, the Nadim Center for the Rehabilitation of
Victims of Violence and Torture documented 23 deaths for which it said
security forces were most likely responsible, including four from
medical negligence, three from torture, and two after the victims went
missing.

Prosecutors opened an investigation into one case, the death of
lawyer Karim Hamdy. Two Egypt Homeland Security officers were arrested
on February 25 in connection with the investigation, and a court
released them on bail of 15,000 Egyptian pounds (US$1,310) on March 28.

Rather than reassessing policies on pretrial detention in the face of
allegations of ill-treatment in police custody or dropping charges
against those unjustly detained, the Interior Minister has issued
decrees officially designating some police stations as prisons.

MASS TRIALS, MILITARY TRIALS OF CIVILIANS & DEATH SENTENCES

The harsh crackdown and arrest campaign that began after the July 2013
coup has sent numerous secular activists to prison, including human
rights defenders Yara Sallam and Mahienour al-Masry, April 6 Youth
Movement co-founder Ahmed Maher, and blogger Alaa Abdel Fattah. Other
secular activists have been sentenced to long prison terms in mass
trials. In February 2015, a judge sentenced activist Ahmed Douma,
women’s rights defender Hend al-Nafea, and 228 others to life in prison
for participating in a December 2011 protest.

Many members of the Muslim Brotherhood including its leaders have
also been prosecuted under al-Sisi. Judges have handed down at least 547
death sentences and many more sentences of life imprisonment for
political violence or activities, many after mass trials involving
alleged Brotherhood supporters and other Islamists.

In separate
decisions on May 16, a criminal court recommended the death penalty for
122 people, including Morsy, the noted academic Emad Shahin, and half a
dozen top Brotherhood officials. The court will rule on whether to
finalize those death sentences on June 16. To date, only one of these
death sentences has been approved by the Court of Cassation, a
requirement before they can be carried out.

After a period of two and a half years after the 2011 uprising in which Egypt carried out no executions,
the authorities have executed 27 people since al-Sisi took up office.
Among them, seven had been convicted of murder in connection with
political violence, six of them following unfair trials in a military
court. The six men were executed despite credible evidence that at least three of them had been in detention at the time of the crimes for which they were accused.

In October 2014, al-Sisi issued a decree expanding military court jurisdiction
to all “public and vital facilities” for two years. Since then,
prosecutors have referred at least 2,280 civilians for military trial,
according to a Human Rights Watch count based on media reports. In May,
one of these military courts, in Alexandria, sentenced six children to 15 years in prison, according to the National Community for Human Rights and Law.

SINAI EVICTIONS

In October 2014, following an attack on an Egyptian army checkpoint in
the Sinai Peninsula by the insurgent group Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, also
known as Sinai Province, the Egyptian armed forces began evicting
thousands of families from their homes along the border with the Gaza
Strip. Al-Sisi claimed that armed groups in the Sinai had received
weapons and fighters through tunnels from Gaza.

The removal of thousands of families from the border zone violated
protections against forced evictions under international human rights
law. The US State Department May 2015 report on Egypt to the US Congress
stated that “government forces have committed arbitrary or otherwise
unlawful killings during dispersal of demonstrators, of persons in
custody, and during military operations in the northern Sinai
Peninsula.”

DEUTSCHE WELLE

Although human rights violations are out of hand in his country,
Egyptian President al-Sisi has officially been welcomed in the German
Chancellery in Berlin: Germany is sending the wrong signal, says DW's
Rainer Sollich.

Rainer Sollich

Nearly 40,000 people are imprisoned in Egypt for political reasons;
death sentences are being issued as if they're going out of style. In
just the past two years, Amnesty International has tallied more than 740
legally questionable sentences. The government has set its sights on
Islamists, but they have also targeted liberal human rights activists
and advocates of democracy - people who are hoping for support from
Europe and who also deserve it.

It's sending the wrong signal for Egypt's autocratic President Abdel
Fattah al-Sisi, who is mainly responsible for the country's grievances,
to be
diplomatically received on a major international stage in Germany
and not even forced to answer critical questions asked by his host.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has addressed human rights violations in
talks and criticized the death penalty; however, given the gravity of
the human rights breaches in Egypt, her demeanor has been unusually
cautious. The German chancellor must ask herself why she even bothered
to invite al-Sisi at this premature stage.

Merkel herself had originally stipulated parliamentary elections before
they met. Elections are still nowhere near - and at this point, they
would probably be neither free nor fair. Al-Sisi's government - by
decree - brutally represses the majority of the public.

The president
enjoys the support of state-managed or state-influenced media, which
often strike an anti-European tone or unabashedly spread conspiracy
theories. That's something Merkel did not comment on, at least not
publicly. Germany has not openly demanded transparency after absurd
prison sentences for two members of the German Konrad Adenauer
Foundation in Cairo were repealed: Sisi must feel heartened.DOES AL-SISSI REALLY STAND FOR STABILITY?

Egypt is, of course, an important country that cannot be ignored by
Germany and Europe - similar to other major authoritarian regimes like
Russia, China or Saudi Arabia. Cairo cannot be overlooked in the
campaign against terrorism or the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean
Sea or the many crises and deteriorating situations in the region.
Europe, however, should closely examine whether Egypt can be of any
help.

Because the opposite is the case. Unlike Tunisian politics, al-Sisi's
domestic policy is not geared toward social reconciliation but instead
has a polarizing effect and bears the risk of further escalation in his
country. The repression of the Muslim Brotherhood and its diverse
political divisions provide fodder for terrorist propaganda.
Furthermore, al-Sisi supports politicians in Libya who rigorously reject
a broad social dialogue, which includes moderate Islamists.

At home, the president's brutal crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood has
also led to Egypt no longer being viewed as a neutral peace mediator by
Israel since Hamas is part of the Muslim Brotherhood. This is not the
way contributing to regional stability works.

There were plenty of reasons not to invite al-Sisi to Germany - or at
least to postpone his visit. His trip could have been put off until his
reform agenda went into effect or an election was scheduled.

Economically, al-Sisi is much more dependent on Germany than vice versa,
but the leverage has gone largely unused even though human rights
organizations in Germany and the opposition in Egypt are demanding more
political pressure be put on al-Sisi. Despite any criticism that may
have been expressed behind closed doors, al-Sisi will use the visit for
propaganda purposes and claim success for himself. TRUE TO DEMOCRATIC PRINCIPLES
At least someone has stuck to his democratic principles: Norbert
Lammert, Merkel's fellow party member and president of the Bundestag.

He
refused to meet with al-Sisi, pointing out the numerous human rights
violations in Egypt. On the other hand, Volker Kauder, also Merkel's
fellow party member and head of the Christian Democratic Union's
parliamentary group, may just have flattered al-Sisi: He extolled the
autocrat's sincerity on Egyptian TV, calling him "convincing" and
"credible" - as if human rights meant nothing to Kauder and his party.

Guess which of the two politicians was quoted extensively in Egypt state
media?